spaCy/website/docs/usage/spacy-101.jade

//- 💫 DOCS > USAGE > SPACY 101

include ../../_includes/_mixins

p
    |  Whether you're new to spaCy, or just want to brush up on some
    |  NLP basics and implementation details – this page should have you covered.
    |  Each section will explain one of spaCy's features in simple terms and
    |  with examples or illustrations. Some sections will also reappear across
    |  the usage guides as a quick introcution.

+aside("Help us improve the docs")
    |  Did you spot a mistake or come across explanations that
    |  are unclear? We always appreciate improvement
    |  #[+a(gh("spaCy") + "/issues") suggestions] or
    |  #[+a(gh("spaCy") + "/pulls") pull requests]. You can find a "Suggest
    |  edits" link at the bottom of each page that points you to the source.

+h(2, "whats-spacy") What's spaCy?

+grid.o-no-block
    +grid-col("half")
        p
            |  spaCy is a #[strong free, open-source library] for advanced
            |  #[strong Natural Language Processing] (NLP) in Python.

        p
            |  If you're working with a lot of text, you'll eventually want to
            |  know more about it. For example, what's it about? What do the
            |  words mean in context? Who is doing what to whom? What companies
            |  and products are mentioned? Which texts are similar to each other?

        p
            |  spaCy is designed specifically for #[strong production use] and
            |  helps you build applications that process and "understand"
            |  large volumes of text. It can be used to build
            |  #[strong information extraction] or
            |  #[strong natural language understanding] systems, or to
            |  pre-process text for #[strong deep learning].

    +table-of-contents
        +item #[+a("#features") Features]
        +item #[+a("#annotations") Linguistic annotations]
        +item #[+a("#annotations-token") Tokenization]
        +item #[+a("#annotations-pos-deps") POS tags and dependencies]
        +item #[+a("#annotations-ner") Named entities]
        +item #[+a("#vectors-similarity") Word vectors and similarity]
        +item #[+a("#pipelines") Pipelines]
        +item #[+a("#vocab") Vocab, hashes and lexemes]
        +item #[+a("#serialization") Serialization]
        +item #[+a("#training") Training]
        +item #[+a("#language-data") Language data]
        +item #[+a("#architecture") Architecture]
        +item #[+a("#community") Community & FAQ]

+h(3, "what-spacy-isnt") What spaCy isn't

+list
    +item #[strong spaCy is not a platform or "an API"].
        |  Unlike a platform, spaCy does not provide a software as a service, or
        |  a web application. It's an open-source library designed to help you
        |  build NLP applications, not a consumable service.
    +item #[strong spaCy is not an out-of-the-box chat bot engine].
        |  While spaCy can be used to power conversational applications, it's
        |  not designed specifically for chat bots, and only provides the
        |  underlying text processing capabilities.
    +item #[strong spaCy is not research software].
        |  It's is built on the latest research, but it's designed to get
        |  things done. This leads to fairly different design decisions than
        |  #[+a("https://github./nltk/nltk") NLTK]
        |  or #[+a("https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/") CoreNLP], which were
        |  created as platforms for teaching and research. The main difference
        |  is that spaCy is integrated and opinionated. spaCy tries to avoid asking
        |  the user to choose between multiple algorithms that deliver equivalent
        |  functionality. Keeping the menu small lets spaCy deliver generally better
        |  performance and developer experience.
    +item #[strong spaCy is not a company].
        |  It's an open-source library. Our company publishing spaCy and other
        |  software is called #[+a(COMPANY_URL, true) Explosion AI].

+h(2, "features") Features

p
    |  In the documentation, you'll come across mentions of spaCy's
    |  features and capabilities. Some of them refer to linguistic concepts,
    |  while others are related to more general machine learning functionality.

+aside
    |  If one of spaCy's functionalities #[strong needs a model], it means that
    |  you need to have one our the available
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/models") statistical models] installed. Models are used
    |  to #[strong predict] linguistic annotations – for example, if a word is
    |  a verb or a noun.

+table(["Name", "Description", "Needs model"])
    +row
        +cell #[strong Tokenization]
        +cell Segmenting text into words, punctuations marks etc.
        +cell #[+procon("con")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Part-of-speech] (POS) #[strong Tagging]
        +cell Assigning word types to tokens, like verb or noun.
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Dependency Parsing]
        +cell
            |  Assigning syntactic dependency labels, describing the relations
            |  between individual tokens, like subject or object.
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Lemmatization]
        +cell
            |  Assigning the base forms of words. For example, the lemma of
            |  "was" is "be", and the lemma of "rats" is "rat".
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Sentence Boundary Detection] (SBD)
        +cell Finding and segmenting individual sentences.
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Named Entity Recongition] (NER)
        +cell
            |  Labelling named "real-world" objects, like persons, companies or
            |  locations.
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Rule-based Matching]
        +cell
            |  Finding sequences of tokens based on their texts and linguistic
            |  annotations, similar to regular expressions.
        +cell #[+procon("con")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Similarity]
        +cell
            |  Comparing words, text spans and documents and how similar they
            |  are to each other.
        +cell #[+procon("pro")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Training]
        +cell Updating and improving a statistical model's predictions.
        +cell #[+procon("neutral")]

    +row
        +cell #[strong Serialization]
        +cell Saving objects to files or byte strings.
        +cell #[+procon("neutral")]

+h(2, "annotations") Linguistic annotations

p
    |  spaCy provides a variety of linguistic annotations to give you
    |  #[strong insights into a text's grammatical structure]. This includes the
    |  word types, like the parts of speech, and how the words are related to
    |  each other. For example, if you're analysing text, it makes a huge
    |  difference whether a noun is the subject of a sentence, or the object –
    |  or whether "google" is used as a verb, or refers to the website or
    |  company in a specific context.

p
    |  Once you've downloaded and installed a #[+a("/docs/usage/models") model],
    |  you can load it via #[+api("spacy#load") #[code spacy.load()]]. This will
    |  return a #[code Language] object contaning all components and data needed
    |  to process text. We usually call it #[code nlp]. Calling the #[code nlp]
    |  object on a string of text will return a processed #[code Doc]:

+code.
    import spacy

    nlp = spacy.load('en')
    doc = nlp(u'Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion')

p
    |  Even though a #[code Doc] is processed – e.g. split into individual words
    |  and annotated – it still holds #[strong all information of the original text],
    |  like whitespace characters. You can always get the offset of a token into the
    |  original string, or reconstruct the original by joining the tokens and their
    |  trailing whitespace. This way, you'll never lose any information
    |  when processing text with spaCy.

+h(3, "annotations-token") Tokenization

include _spacy-101/_tokenization

+infobox
    |  To learn more about how spaCy's tokenization rules work in detail,
    |  how to #[strong customise and replace] the default tokenizer and how to
    |  #[strong add language-specific data], see the usage guides on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/adding-languages") adding languages] and
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/customizing-tokenizer") customising the tokenizer].

+h(3, "annotations-pos-deps") Part-of-speech tags and dependencies
    +tag-model("dependency parse")

include _spacy-101/_pos-deps

+infobox
    |  To learn more about #[strong part-of-speech tagging] and rule-based
    |  morphology, and how to #[strong navigate and use the parse tree]
    |  effectively, see the usage guides on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/pos-tagging") part-of-speech tagging] and
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/dependency-parse") using the dependency parse].

+h(3, "annotations-ner") Named Entities
    +tag-model("named entities")

include _spacy-101/_named-entities

+infobox
    |  To learn more about entity recognition in spaCy, how to
    |  #[strong add your own entities] to a document and how to
    |  #[strong train and update] the entity predictions of a model, see the
    |  usage guides on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/entity-recognition") named entity recognition] and
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/training-ner") training the named entity recognizer].

+h(2, "vectors-similarity") Word vectors and similarity
    +tag-model("vectors")

include _spacy-101/_similarity

include _spacy-101/_word-vectors

+infobox
    |  To learn more about word vectors, how to #[strong customise them] and
    |  how to load #[strong your own vectors] into spaCy, see the usage
    |  guide on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/word-vectors-similarities") using word vectors and semantic similarities].

+h(2, "pipelines") Pipelines

include _spacy-101/_pipelines

+infobox
    |  To learn more about #[strong how processing pipelines work] in detail,
    |  how to enable and disable their components, and how to
    |  #[strong create your own], see the usage guide on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/language-processing-pipeline") language processing pipelines].

+h(2, "vocab") Vocab, hashes and lexemes

include _spacy-101/_vocab

+h(2, "serialization") Serialization

include _spacy-101/_serialization

+infobox
    |  To learn more about #[strong serialization] and how to
    |  #[strong save and load your own models], see the usage guide on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/saving-loading") saving, loading and data serialization].

+h(2, "training") Training

include _spacy-101/_training

+infobox
    |  To learn more about #[strong training and updating] models, how to create
    |  training data and how to improve spaCy's named entity recognition models,
    |  see the usage guides on #[+a("/docs/usage/training") training] and
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/training-ner") training the named entity recognizer].

+h(2, "language-data") Language data

include _spacy-101/_language-data

+infobox
    |  To learn more about the individual components of the language data and
    |  how to #[strong add a new language] to spaCy in preparation for training
    |  a language model, see the usage guide on
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/adding-languages") adding languages].

+h(2, "architecture") Architecture

include _spacy-101/_architecture.jade

+h(2, "community") Community & FAQ

p
    |  We're very happy to see the spaCy community grow and include a mix of
    |  people from all kinds of different backgrounds – computational
    |  linguistics, data science, deep learning, research and more. If you'd
    |  like to get involved, below are some answers to the most important
    |  questions and resources for further reading.

+h(3, "faq-help-code") Help, my code isn't working!

p
    |  Bugs suck, and we're doing our best to continuously improve the tests
    |  and fix bugs as soon as possible. Before you submit an issue, do a
    |  quick search and check if the problem has already been reported. If
    |  you're having installation or loading problems, make sure to also check
    |  out the #[+a("/docs/usage#troubleshooting") troubleshooting guide]. Help
    |  with spaCy is available via the following platforms:

+aside("How do I know if something is a bug?")
    |  Of course, it's always hard to know for sure, so don't worry – we're not
    |  going to be mad if a bug report turns out to be a typo in your
    |  code. As a simple rule, any C-level error without a Python traceback,
    |  like a #[strong segmentation fault] or #[strong memory error],
    |  is #[strong always] a spaCy bug.#[br]#[br]

    |  Because models are statistical, their performance will never be
    |  #[em perfect]. However, if you come across
    |  #[strong patterns that might indicate an underlying issue], please do
    |  file a report. Similarly, we also care about behaviours that
    |  #[strong contradict our docs].

+table(["Platform", "Purpose"])
    +row
        +cell #[+a("https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spacy") StackOverflow]
        +cell
            |  #[strong Usage questions] and everything related to problems with
            |  your specific code. The StackOverflow community is much larger
            |  than ours, so if your problem can be solved by others, you'll
            |  receive help much quicker.

    +row
        +cell #[+a("https://gitter.im/" + SOCIAL.gitter) Gitter chat]
        +cell
            |  #[strong General discussion] about spaCy, meeting other community
            |  members and exchanging #[strong tips, tricks and best practices].
            |  If we're working on experimental models and features, we usually
            |  share them on Gitter first.

    +row
        +cell #[+a(gh("spaCy") + "/issues") GitHub issue tracker]
        +cell
            |  #[strong Bug reports] and #[strong improvement suggestions], i.e.
            |  everything that's likely spaCy's fault. This also includes
            |  problems with the models beyond statistical imprecisions, like
            |  patterns that point to a bug.

+infobox
    |  Please understand that we won't be able to provide individual support via
    |  email. We also believe that help is much more valuable if it's shared
    |  publicly, so that #[strong more people can benefit from it]. If you come
    |  across an issue and you think you might be able to help, consider posting
    |  a quick update with your solution. No matter how simple, it can easily
    |  save someone a lot of time and headache – and the next time you need help,
    |  they might repay the favour.

+h(3, "faq-contributing") How can I contribute to spaCy?

p
    |  You don't have to be an NLP expert or Python pro to contribute, and we're
    |  happy to help you get started. If you're new to spaCy, a good place to
    |  start is the
    |  #[+a(gh("spaCy") + '/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A"help+wanted+%28easy%29"') #[code help wanted (easy)] label]
    |  on GitHub, which we use to tag bugs and feature requests that are easy
    |  and self-contained. We also appreciate contributions to the docs – whether
    |  it's fixing a typo, improving an example or adding additional explanations.
    |  You'll find a "Suggest edits" link at the bottom of each page that points
    |  you to the source.

p
    |  Another way of getting involved is to help us improve the
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/adding-languages#language-data") language data] –
    |  especially if you happen to speak one of the languages currently in
    |  #[+a("/docs/api/language-models#alpha-support") alpha support]. Even
    |  adding simple tokenizer exceptions, stop words or lemmatizer data
    |  can make a big difference. It will also make it easier for us to provide
    |  a statistical model for the language in the future. Submitting a test
    |  that documents a bug or performance issue, or covers functionality that's
    |  especially important for your application is also very helpful. This way,
    |  you'll also make sure we never accidentally introduce regressions to the
    |  parts of the library that you care about the most.

p
    strong
        |  For more details on the types of contributions we're looking for, the
        |  code conventions and other useful tips, make sure to check out the
        |  #[+a(gh("spaCy", "CONTRIBUTING.md")) contributing guidelines].

+infobox("Code of Conduct")
    |  spaCy adheres to the
    |  #[+a("http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/") Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct].
    |  By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.

+h(3, "faq-project-with-spacy")
    |  I've built something cool with spaCy – how can I get the word out?

p
    |  First, congrats – we'd love to check it out! When you share your
    |  project on Twitter, don't forget to tag
    |  #[+a("https://twitter.com/" + SOCIAL.twitter) @#{SOCIAL.twitter}] so we
    |  don't miss it. If you think your project would be a good fit for the
    |  #[+a("/docs/usage/showcase") showcase], #[strong feel free to submit it!]
    |  Tutorials are also incredibly valuable to other users and a great way to
    |  get exposure. So we strongly encourage #[strong writing up your experiences],
    |  or sharing your code and some tips and tricks on your blog. Since our
    |  website is open-source, you can add your project or tutorial by making a
    |  pull request on GitHub.

+aside("Contributing to spacy.io")
    |  All showcase and tutorial links are stored in a
    |  #[+a(gh("spaCy", "website/docs/usage/_data.json")) JSON file], so you
    |  won't even have to edit any markup. For more info on how to submit
    |  your project, see the
    |  #[+a(gh("spaCy", "CONTRIBUTING.md#submitting-a-project-to-the-showcase")) contributing guidelines]
    |  and our #[+a(gh("spaCy", "website")) website docs].

p
    |  If you would like to use the spaCy logo on your site, please get in touch
    |  and ask us first. However, if you want to show support and tell others
    |  that your project is using spaCy, you can grab one of our
    |  #[strong spaCy badges] here:

- SPACY_BADGES =  ["built%20with-spaCy-09a3d5.svg", "made%20with%20❤%20and-spaCy-09a3d5.svg", "spaCy-v2-09a3d5.svg"]
+quickstart([{id: "badge", input_style: "check", options: SPACY_BADGES.map(function(badge, i) { return {id: i, title: "<img class='o-icon' src='https://img.shields.io/badge/" + badge + "' height='20'/>", checked: (i == 0) ? true : false}}) }], false, false, true)
    .c-code-block(data-qs-results)
        for badge, i in SPACY_BADGES
            - var url = "https://img.shields.io/badge/" + badge
            +code(false, "text", "star").o-no-block(data-qs-badge=i)=url
            +code(false, "text", "code").o-no-block(data-qs-badge=i).
                &lt;a href="#{SITE_URL}"&gt;&lt;img src="#{url}" height="20"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
            +code(false, "text", "markdown").o-no-block(data-qs-badge=i).
                [![spaCy](#{url})](#{SITE_URL})